Warriors of pop, 21 years of ZTT

Poster/art dealer MEM have unearthed two pieces of artwork (6”x 9”) prepared for the cover for the Frankie Goes To Hollywood LP Welcome To The Pleasuredome. Released in October 1984, the LP was a No.1 hit and was voted Best Dressed LP Cover in the 1984 NME Readers’ Poll. The artwork is a version of the image used on the front of the LP while the somewhat risqué artwork of the animals is an early version of that used on the back cover. The final version was similarly controversial and only accepted with the introduction of strategically-positioned fig-leaves. Extremely rare, visually appealing and highly evocative of the 80s, these items will be sold with a letter of authentication by the artist himself. See ZTT feature elsewhere in this issue.

Warriors of pop, 21 years of ZTT

From Frankie Goes To Hollywood to Seal, from Propaganda to 808 State, the UK’s original futurist record label celebrates its 21st anniversary this month. Formed by journalist PAUL MORLEY, producer TREVOR HORN and his wife JILL SINCLAIR, Zang Tuum Tumb blasted onto the scene in 1983 with bravado, manifestos and some of the most intelligent, uniquely identifiable music of the last 30 years.

By Ian Peel

Trevor Horn — currently celebrating his 25th year in the business — wanted to create an intelligent pop music factory, somewhere to explore the Phil Spector-like creations he’d conjured up for the likes of Yes and his own band, The Buggles. Paul Morley wanted to use words and imagery to challenge the very perception of what pop music can be.

They succeeded quickly and within their first year released three of the defining albums of the 80s, occupied No.1 and No.2 on the singles chart simultaneously, and put political sloganeering on the chests of millions with one of the decade’s biggest fashions. But there have been equally dramatic down-sides, too. Court cases, TV and radio bans, studio punch-ups, sexual controversy, tabloid shock over bands not playing on their records, singles being pressed only to be melted down over illegal samples… It’s been an eventful 21 years.

“A Radiant Obstacle In The Path Of The Obvious” was how Paul Morley first described Zang Tuum Tumb, and his influence — which extended to posters, adverts, videos, record sleeves and T-shirts — was as dramatic as Horn’s productions. He commissioned the ‘superpowers wrestling match’ video for FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD’s Two Tribes and orgy scenes for Relax. He promoted ART OF NOISE as a completely faceless anti-band, whose press photos depicted spanners and statues, and decorated PROPAGANDA sleeves with lengthy excerpts of JG Ballard novels. Press adverts showed compelling nuclear war statistics one minute and nothing but a bowl of fruit the next.

Horn and Morley also redefined record collecting — FGTH’s Relax appeared in over 12 different formats, three different videos were made for Art Of Noise’s Close (To The Edit) and over 20 different mixes were issued of Propaganda’s debut single. Heavily influenced by Factory Records, everything from concerts to cassingles had a catalogue number.

“ZTT: warriors of pop or theatre of hype?” asked the NME in a front page special in 1984. Sixty-two albums and over 200 singles later, the answer is clearly the former.

“I was a fan of ZTT, not just for the supposed radicalism of it, but for the sheer brilliance of the records they were putting out,” says Thomas Leer of the time he was putting ACT together with Claudia Brücken in 1988. “There wasn’t a record I didn’t like in their whole roster, so obviously I wanted to sign to a label like that.”

At the heart of this radicalism and brilliance was one band: FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. From obscurity to infamy and back again in less than five years, Frankie defined the early era of ZTT and for many, 80s music in general. Bass player Mark O’Toole’s memories of the ZTT years are — with the benefit of hindsight — fond. “Top Of The Pops for the first time was a good’un,” he says, “being No. 1 for the first time… Holding No.1 and 2 in the charts at the same time with Relax and Two Tribes… Seeing a wasted Ozzy trying to get on stage with us at Hammersmith Odeon!”

“The ZTT offices early on were great fun. All the bands would hang out and have a laugh. We used to get up to all sorts of mischief as none of the offices had any locks on them. Dr. Mabuse/Femme Fatale test pressing anyone? Or Art of Noise? We ‘borrowed’ them all. I liked the Propaganda guys/girls they were more fun than their image suggested! There are lots of good memories because I was doing exactly what I had been wishing for since I was a small child…”

FGTH couldn’t have been more different from ANNE PIGALLE, another early signing. For some reason she was likened to Sade by the press at the time but was far more complex and challenging. Pigalle spent most of 1984 waiting by the studio literally — for Trevor Horn to finish his umpteenth Frankie remix, so he could start on her album. So Paul Morley began placing ‘coming soon’ adverts in the style press. “It was an experience,” she says, looking back philosophically.

“I was very young when I signed the ZTT thing and I didn’t really know where things were going to go,” Anne remembers. “For some people, they work for 20 years and do nothing and then they get a deal, but for me it was the other way around and I had a big producer straight away. But of course being young, I was ready to make more compromises. I’ve learned that’s no good, because at the end of the day you don’t really get totally the right thing out there.”

Glamorous and daring, Pigalle’s singles were the kind of leftfield pop that only ZTT was providing a platform for. But her debut album Everything Could Be So Perfect… (ZTT IQ7) failed to capture and press her spirit onto vinyl, something that Horn had achieved so well with Frankie. “I think the album is OK but I think a lot of the production’s not so great,” she says. “I’ve got a stage persona and Trevor was not capable of capturing that.”

ZTT were the only label that gave avant-garde classical music a major platform in the 80s. Motley, Horn and Sinclair’s love of ANDREW POPPY’s Steve Reich-styled compositions, and (in no small part) the commercial freedom that the Frankie royalties afforded them, lead to his signing and release of material that is set to be anthologised later this year for its 20th anniversary. “It’s true I did learn an enormous amount,” Poppy told Tangents magazine of his time with the label.

“They let me produce my own records — the only artist on ZTT to do so. Being close to what Trevor and Steve Lipson were doing was fantastic. They showed me how they were working on the Grace Jones project with two digital machines. I looked though the Two Tribes multi-track… [It was] so elegantly put together as a production — like a Brian Wilson thing. And The Art Of Noise were around, Gary Langan and Anne Dudley. I was a big Art Of Noise fan. That’s why I’d gone to ZTT in the first place…”

Poppy’s second album, Alphabed (ZTT IQ9), was released just as the label went into a complete state of flux. In 1988 pop as we knew it was dead — dance music and acid house had been born. Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Propaganda, Art Of Noise and Pigalle were all leaving with varying degrees of legal tension and ZTT’s 1988 roster — Das Phych-oh! Rangers, Act and Nasty Rox Inc. — were imploding as quickly as they were releasing records.

ZTT were bought into in a major way by WEA, Trevor Horn started producing artists outside of his label for the first time in years, Holly Johnson won his court case and walked out the front door, while Andrew Poppy and Paul Morley quietly exited stage left. ZTT, Version 1.0, was in meltdown.

If this was a film, and ZTT’s story does have more than a few cinematic qualities, then at this moment a shot of a sunset in London would fade to black, then fade to sunrise over Manchester, zooming in on the Haçienda where the crowd are going wild to 808 STATE. “A fusing of deep experimental urge with a ferocious, philosophical desire to dance,” Paul Morley later recalled, “808 State were like the missing link between Cabaret Voltaire and Aphex Twin.”

808 State’s first album, 808:90 (ZTT 2) — containing the hits Pacific State (ZANG 1) and Cubik (ZANG 5) — was a critical success and their second, 1991’s ex:el (ZTT 6) was massive commercially. It may not have been any where near the scale of Welcome To The Pleasuredome, but ex:el and its hit singles Ooops (featuring Bjork, ZANG 19) and In Yer Face (ZANG 14) became the cornerstone of a highly successful and wonderfully diverse period for ZTT. More to the point it proved the doubters wrong that, post-Horn and Morley, the label had anything worthwhile to offer.

But 808 weren’t ZTT’s first dance signing — the overlap from bombastic 80s techno to acid house was bridged by NASTY ROX INC.. One of the first rock bands to have a permanent DJ in their line-up, they were light-years ahead of their time. Morley wanted Action Men toys to replace the band in publicity shots, but Nasty Rox insisted on being seen as a real band, not a musical or conceptual novelty. They produced a seminal album — Ca$h (ZTT 1) — and gained NME front-cover credibility, but scored few sales and vanished without trace.

But the groundwork had been laid, as ZTT’s entered phase two, the dance years, which centred around five very individual artists. 808 State were joined by supersonic rapper and fellow Manchester luminary MC Tunes, dark samplists Hoodlum Priest and Peterborough’s Shades Of Rhythm who became synonymous with the rave scene. All scored Top 10 hits, but biggest of all in chart terms was SEAL. Trevor Horn had jumped at signing Seal when he heard Killer, the singer’s collaboration with Adamski, which was a massive No.1 in 1990. They hit it off immediately and Horn threw himself into recording the singer’s debut album which spawned four hit singles, including Crazy (ZANG 8) and Future Love Paradise (ZANG 11). Seal knew that ZTT’s reputation was precarious when Crazy was released. Could the label really survive, post-Morley and post-court case?

“If Crazy hadn’t have been a hit, people wouldn’t have looked at me,” Seal said at the time. “They’d have said ZTT fucked it up again.” By 1992, Seal had put Horn and ZTT back on the map. He scooped three Brit Awards that year, including best album, and Horn won best producer, not for the first time.

The undoubted star of Madchester The Sound of the North — the TV documentary that ignited the early-90s baggy scene — was MC TUNES, who told me how he signed to ZTT when he was just 18.

“808 State had done a track called Pacific State, which was on a little independent album called Quadrastate, and it went really big and it was selling shitloads. So ZTT signed them through a guy called Ron Atkinson, who had a record shop called in Manchester called Music Mania. They re-released Pacific and it got to No.7 in the charts. I was doing demos with 808 State at the time and one of the people down at ZTT heard the The Only Rhyme That Bites and said ‘yeah, let’s put it out’.”

The single went Top 10, as did its sequel Tunes Splits The Atom (ZANG 6) and Tunes’ album with 808, The North At Its Heights (ZTT 3). But MC Tunes and ZTT parted company when the label decided not to release his second album. It’s easy to forget how embryonic rap was 15 years ago, and Tunes would have arguments with the label about whether it was just a flash in the pan.

“I was saying how rap was going to be around in 10 and 20 years time and that it was the new rock’n’roll, but they just couldn’t see it,” he says. “They thought it was going to go the way of Showaddywaddy or glam rock…”

While MC Tunes was recording The North At Its Heights, ZTT released The Heart of Darkness (ZTT 4) by HOODLUM PRIEST, a two-piece studio outfit of Apollo 400 collaborators who soldered rap onto guitars onto samples of Blade Runner, Robocop and Hellraiser. True to Zang Tuum Tumb’s original spirit and brimming with potential, they vanished soon after. The band blamed ZTT’s reluctance to release any singles from the album and ZTT blamed Warners, who’d bought a large chunk of its business in 1988.

The purchase had put the label back on an even footing after the Frankie court case and Island years, but also limited its ability to develop artists over the long term. Warners were also wary of Hoodlum Priest’s output (which was working above the law in terms of sample clearance) and was on the edge with the imagery and artwork they wanted to use. “We’ve had enough of this corporate fascism,” the band’s manger told me in 1991 as they headed off to find a new deal.

But the Warners deal had its benefits. It was the reason why bleep house trio SHADES OF RHYTHM signed to ZTT in the first place — they wanted the personal touch of Horn and Sinclair but with the added backing of a major. They were managed by Ron Atkinson and, like 808, had generated a massive buzz with a self-produced, self-pressed debut, 1990’s Frequency. With just 1000 copies pressed, it remains highly collectable to this day.

By their third ZTT single, Sound Of Eden (ZANG 22), Shades were in the Top 40. Their fourth, Extacy (ZANG 24), made No. 14 and their album — effectively a rerecording of Frequency — sold 50,000 copies. The band perfectly straddled the commercial and underground sides of rave. They played Extacy on Top Of The Pops one minute, then did early raves alongside 808 State in front of 17,000 people the next. Their fifth, unreleased single, Happy Feelings (ZANG 32), was perfect pop on the A-side, while Fear Of The Future explored the ecstasy generation’s precarious sensibilities and dark undercurrents on the B-side.

Various one-off promos and collectable singles floated out the back door of ZTT at this time, financed by the high sales of Seal and the like. Ex-Ant Kevin Mooney released a dub version of Bob Marley’s Waiting In Vain under the guise of LOMAX, (ZANG 9) and ZTT tapped into the highly influential ‘Berlin bears’ scene, pressing up criminally overlooked promos from SUN ELECTRIC and TIME UNLIMITED.

A brace of superb rave singles also appeared, although they were ignored by the charts which were then swamped by the children’s TV-sampling rave. Collectors should seek out Intensify by MANTRA USE LP PIC (ZANG 34), Rise by Scottish duo SOLID STATE LOGIC (ZANG 31) and We Can Do It (ZANG 30) by Praga Khan off-shoot GENERAL MAX, all of which came with the prerequisite stack of remixes and limited editions.

By 1993 ZTT were facing the end of an era. Again. Shades Of Rhythm had been devastated over the Happy Feelings saga and literally played out the end of their contract. 808 State’s follow-up to ex:el (Gorgeous, ZTT 12) was impeccable, bur they’d laboured over it and fallen out of the public eye in the meantime. And Seal and Trevor Horn had come to blows — literally — when they went back into the studio to record his second album.

So ZTT went back to square one — and turned to remixers for a series of FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD and label reissues to celebrate their tenth anniversary. FGTH went back into the singles charts courtesy of Brothers In Rhythm, Fluke and Ollie J, and ZTT got to stake their claim on the UK dance scene with Zance — an album that put Art of Noise alongside 808 State and defined the label’s influence. “The idea behind the remix was just to recapture the vibe of the original,” Ollie J told me about his version of Relax (FGTH 1) when it charted.

“Relax was shocking in a way that when you played it you instantly know what it is, like BANG!

In the clubs, it’s very anthem-like. I wanted to try and keep that. The idea was to get it into a club vein, to get it a bit more up-to-date, bur not to lose any energy.”

ZTT signed new artists in the mid-90s but all began to fall into a familiar path of great potential followed by one great single followed by obscurity. Ex-EZ Posse singer (and — sshh — Joan Collins’ daughter) TARA released the woefully overlooked classic Save Me From Myself (ZANG 47). Adamski followed Seal into the ZTT fold for When We Were Young (ZANG 55) with singer Loretta Heywood under the moniker of L.A.Z.Y., and then there was HONKY. This rap duo were massively over-hyped but they did get to album stage (The Ego Has Landed) bur this rushed to the bargain bins, bur not before they’d satisfied the ‘one great single’ rule with The Whistler (ZANG 48).

Only ALL SAINTS broke this trend. Two great singles and stardom, although that came after they left the label. Before Shaznay Lewis and Melanie Blatt teamed up with the Appleton sisters they were known as All Saints 1.9.7.5 and were managed by early drum’n’bass guru Ron Tom Penny. ZTT released two singles — now both highly collectable — in Silver Shadow (ZANG 53) and If You Wanna Party (ZANG 71).

“We didn’t know what direction we wanted t0 go in and ZTT didn’t really know what to do with us,” Melanie Blatt remembers, “so it was a pretty short lived thing.”

These one-offs all appeared on Zance, ZTT’s mid-90s sub-label for dance and non-pop releases. Shades of Rhythm had already got their own imprint off the ground when their 1994 single Getting Away (and a host of collectable promos) were released on SOR Recordings via ZTT.

Their manager Ron Atkinson went on to set up the rather less impressive 7 Records imprint, which scatter-gunned house 12”s in the late 90s. Having released some flimsy remixes of Propaganda, 7 transformed into Para.llel Records before going further underground. In 2000 the Vision imprint appeared and lasted for six releases which are well worth seeking out. They include the OMD-sampling Free Again by NOWA NOWA (VSN I), ROMAIN & DANNY’s Philly Groove (VSN 6), which featured Chicago disco legend Linda Clifford, and Sonique-favourire Mind Made Up by XTRA LARGE (VSN7).

By 1996 the only thing that was selling on ZTT was Seal. But he was more than selling — Seal’s second self-titled album hoovered Grammys and it’s main single Kiss From A Rose (ZANG 52) made No. 1 in the US, albeit on its second release (ZANG 70) after appearing on the Batman Forever soundtrack.

Except for Seal, Trevor Horn’s musical involvement in the label had all but vanished. He hadn’t involved himself seriously in anything for some time and instead headed to America to produce the cream of the MOR pop scene. But in 1997 he got back into his own label to let his hair down with a few pet projects in the form of a soundtrack for the Glam Metal Detectives TV show.

This followed 1992’s Robin Williams film Toys, whose soundtrack was — like the film — full of flights of fancy, like a reworking of Frankie’s Pleasuredome for the film’s final battle scene. Toys also saw Horn back in the studio with GRACE JONES, their first collaboration since 1985’s Slave To The Rhythm which is — for many — the pinnacle of his early career and the early years of ZTT. Ripe for re-release (two different versions originally appeared), it’s been heavily sampled by The Orb and its front cover became a defining fashion icon.

Following Glam Metal Detectives, Horn went to town on a single for TOM JONES — the anime-as-music explosion of If I Only Knew (ZANG 59). These pet projects sold well, unlike the lacklustre, derivative dance singles the label was picking up at the time by the likes of NOVOCENTO (Day And Night, ZANG 66), KLYMAXX (I’ve Got A Feeling, ZANG 83) and REHAB (Superfriendly, ZANG 89). But RHYTHM INC.’s Soul Rising featuring Nevada (ZANG 74) was a high quality exception.

Proving all the doubters wrong mid-way, by the late 90s ZTT had enjoyed over 10 years of critical and commercial success. Trevor Horn was back in the studio having fun, bur they were about to venture wildly off-course. The label thar originally placed press adverts stating “We hate all American AOR pensioners”, the one that wanted to — as Trevor Horn once described — “build a really huge computer and sign it to ZTT as ‘Elvis Computer’… you could conceivably do anything with it”!) started signing, of all things, rock music.

First up was SHANE MacGOWAN, who started off impressively enough, debuting That Woman’s Got Me Drinking (ZANG 56) on Top Of The Pops with Johnny Depp on guirar. Bur further singles, including Haunted (ZANG 65) with Sinead O’Connor and You’re The One (ZANG 68) with Maire Brennan (ZANG 68) only preached to the converted and played to the faithful.

THE FRAMES DC were another rock signing. They had already established a major following in Ireland and bought with them a debut album which was partly re-recorded with the help of Trevor Horn. The result, Fizcorraldo (ZTT 110) was solid but hardly lit any fires. Far more impressive was their second album, 1999’s Dance The Devil (ZTT 127) with the delicate, haunting Star Star. The band split from ZTT soon after and have since said the break gave them exactly the push they needed to take a left turn with their music and start afresh.

THE MARBLES and Manchester singer songwriter LEE GRIFFITHS were the other rock signings from this period. The former purveyed bog-standard indie, the latter lightweight soul searching although, it has to be said with the odd moving moment. But it wasn’t all bad. Such a gloriously low-tech signing as KIRSTY MacCOLL had come as a bit of shock in 1992 but surprisingly her resulting, wonderful album Titanic Days turned our to be a must-have for anyone with even a passing interest in her music. Relatively ignored on release, it suffered by the weakest track leading as a single. Angel (ZANG 46) followed FGTH’s The Power of Love and LORENZA’s Jerusalem (ZANG 25) as a ZTT Christmas single but even a front cover painting by Holly Johnson and remixes by Apollo 440 couldn’t get it off the starting blocks.

With these rock bands in place, any attempt to do something that bucked the mainstream now seemed to be absent from ZTT. As Dave Gledhill, now in Sheffield band Slo-Mo, once told Atomic Duster magazine, “I was in a band called Elephant And Rhino… like a cross between Nirvana and Pulp Fiction. It was very dark and nasty, and so extreme that I’m not sure any of the record companies wanted to touch us. I remember we did a showcase for the head of ZTT, and we started with a very dark number called Bank Job. We all came out with suits on, but with stockings over our heads. He walked out pretty much straight away…”

It was this sense of danger and experimentation that Paul Morley tried to re-inject when, as the new millennium approached, he returned to ZTT. The first thing he did was change the label’s name back to Zang Tuum Tumb and then began working on some truly important music again — albeit briefly. The label had split from Warners (unfortunately losing Seal in the process) so there was scope to be a bit more daring.

Morley was initially involved in an A&R and promotional spree, possibly ZTT’s last real attempt to look like a cohesive, focused label, that saw the release of a promo compilation — Zang Tumb Pop (SAM 1698) — with tracks from three new signings SEXUS, like the Pet Shop Boys on acid and the far less interesting THE FLOOD (a relatively un listenable trance-pop band).

Having provided ‘clues’ on LEE GRIFFITHS’ First Things First EP (LEEP 1 CD) Morley’s fresh influence was most obvious as ‘co-conspirator’ on ADAMSKI’s Thing (ZTT 114CD) project and the esoteric packaging of 808 STATE’s last album for the label, Don Solaris (ZTT 105CD). Thing worked well on paper, but not in practice, although Shark Tank’s remixes of Intravenous Venus (10” promo, ZTT 122TPX) are worth seeking out.

Ambient was always a path that Morley had left untravelled at ZTT. But on his return he urged Trevor Horn to ‘record’ a version of John Cage’s original ambient meisterwerk 4’33” (though Horn was unwilling to split royalties on three minutes of silence!) and released the fantastically chilled Electric Hush (ZTT 99) by HEIGHTS OF ABRAHAM. One of the undiscovered gems of the latter-day ZTT catalogue, it starts off with a swirly electronic seascape and seductively unwinds from there on in. Chill-out in the purest, Eno sense (with vocals reminiscent of the grandmaster, too), it was recorded long before the genre became a byword for compilation overkill.

Before the 90s were over, ZTT’s last full-on attempt to launch a new ‘pure pop’ artist into the charts was LEILANI, a bizarre hybrid of Daphne & Celeste and Betty Boo. She started off with a fairly credible dance offering, as a double clear vinyl 12” promo of remixes from Shark Tank and The Beatmasters (ZTT 124TP1 & ZTT 124TP2) testified. But despite videos and Smash Hits Tour appearances, her single Madness Thing (ZTT 124) only scraped the Top 40 and Do You Want Me? (ZTT 134) and Flying Elvis (ZTT 145) did nothing. Her album was completed and reached promo stage but was never released, the fourth single (This Is Your Life) was scrapped and Leilani vanished as suddenly as she had appeared.

Before they got a deal, SEXUS had built an underground reputation as ‘the new Stooges’ although they actually came across more like an 18-certificate art-house version of the Pet Shop Boys. Strange bedfellows for Leilani, Sexus’ David Savage told me how things got off to a shaky start:

“Our A&R man told us that he saw us as total chart pop, put us on the Smash Hits Roadshow with all the boy bands. But at the same time, we were recording an album full of songs about murdered male prostitutes, people dying in hospitals, the thugs you meet in your local dole queue… He blew a gasket when he heard it.”

But for a while Sexus were massive. “We’d been getting more positive and fulsome press and magazine coverage of any ZTT act since Frankie,” David remembers.

“It was hard to believe it was all really happening… The Official End Of It All got Best New Single in both Melody Maker — which called us ‘the new Leiber & Stoller’ — and also, quite thrillingly, in Smash Hits, too. Best of all, we were told our single was getting record radio airplay for ZTT.”

But this momentum slid wildly off course when the single crashed and burned through, according to David Savage, distribution issues. “Then, all of a sudden, Paul Morley returned to the label and became our A&R man,” he says. “Morley wanted us more outrageous, more extreme, more underground, more arty, more us in every way.” But it didn’t work and their last single Edenites was conspicuously anonymous — lacking a video or any new photos or promotion. It was, David remembers, like seeing “a baby turtle at the far end of a long beach left to struggle by itself to the sea”. Needless to say the band left soon after.

By the end of the 90s Morley and Horn were both firmly involved with ZTT again and they dived headlong into their dream project. Some years before Horn had produced It’s Alright for The Pet Shop Boys and set about bringing one line of that song ‘Che Guvara and Debussy to a disco beat’ — alive across a whole album. Released under the ART OF NOISE moniker (which ZTT had bought back from founder JJ Jeczalik) it saw Horn and Morley reunite with Anne Dudley and draft in 10CC’s Lol Creme for one of the millennium’s most mesmerising suites of music.

The Seduction of Claude Debussy (ZTT 130) — was recorded across two and a half years and, after the failed promise of Leilani and Sexus, was a startling return to form. Horn and Creme travelled the world, starting off by recording an opera singer in turn of the century costume at an English country manor before hooking up with Rakim in LA, then on to via messing about acoustically in Horn’s Dublin flat. As Lol Creme told me, “The Art Of Noise became like a wonderful practical umbrella that would allow us all to dedicate ourselves to doing something together…”

The finished results managed to recapture the spirit of ZTT almost 20 years after they started and this new incarnation of The Art Of Noise finally tore off the masks and anonymous imagery that Morley had played with in the mid-80s. As he explained to me at the time:

“This time around it’s us four, but The Art Of Noise exists and carries on in all sorts of ways, both in previous time and in future time, as a completely different thing to what people expect. And four people’s a perfect number for a pop group. It always works. Surreal Monkees, that’s what we are and always will be. And I accept my role as Peter Tork and always have done.”

Of course with this original team in place, more than a few collectable versions and limited editions were created. The first was a promo-only 12” of Dreaming In Colour remixes (ZTT 113) by WAY OUT WEST. But to Morley it was merely part of creating the finished album.

“We were treating it, as we often do, as a thing that might have existed,” he once told me, “and somehow the company took that a little bit literally and then it existed for a little while on vinyl and even got into a sleeve and looked quite real. But there was never any intention of releasing it in any form commercially. Maybe in the end we can value that in hindsight by saying it was part of the ‘scam’…”

Another by-product of these sessions was DAVID’S DAUGHTERS — a smooth female two-piece who had sung on the Art Of Noise album and for whom Trevor Horn produced a brace of tracks, including a single Dreaming Of Loving You (ZTT 137). MOR to the point of easy listening, David’s Daughters were the polar opposite of another female duo Horn produced soon after — tATu.

By 2002 tATu represented all that was right and wrong with ZTT. Trevor Horn produced and co-wrote their two key singles — All The Things She Said and Not Gonna Get Us — hits on both sides of the Atlantic. Sexy and controversial, with perfectly formed pop songs, they were like a post-millennial Frankie Goes To Hollywood. But there was only one problem. They weren’t on ZTT.

So who is on ZTT at the moment? Having spent a long time developing heavy metal band Raging Speedhorn, they are now seriously curating their back catalogue before embarking on the next 20 years. Alongside SACD remasters, Outside World (ZTT 180) included a DVD of rare PROPAGANDA and the recent ACT box set (ZTT 185) will be followed by more anthologies in the coming months.

There’s plenty more in the vaults too, to say nothing of the material from the cutting-room floor from the label’s mid-80s heyday. “Morley once told me about a big-budget Frankie movie that had been planned,” says Sexus’s David Savage, “featuring the group in a post-apocalyptic landscape full of monsters and with some big-name actors. It sounded a bit like the dodgy mid-70s Jan-Michael Vincent film version of Damnation Alley…”

Alongside this heritage, Trevor Horn — after a quarter-century in the music industry — is still a major force to be reckoned with. “I have so much respect for Trevor,” Seal told me at the launch for his recent Seal IV album. “Even for things like tATu, in fact more so. I just love it that he can do something like that and then everyone all of a sudden remembers that he can make records.”

“When you don’t have a hit record or when you’re in the public eye for a while or what have you — or if you have a flop — people all of a sudden think you’ve forgotten how to make records,” Seal says of Trevor and ZTT’s ups and downs over the years. “But you don’t forget. You don’t produce 90125 or The Lexicon of Love or Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and then all of a sudden forget how to make records. What happens is that you go off on some experimental kind of search that you’re trying to get something from, and maybe it doesn’t work, but you don’t forget. And that’s really what amazes me. I think that Trevor is the last of a disappearing breed… I really feel that way.”

FIND!

Ten albums that define the spirit of ZTT

Propaganda – A Secret Wish

Nasty Rox Inc. – Ca$h

FGTH – Welcome To The Pleasuredome

808 State – ex:el

Art of Noise – Reconstructed… For Your Listening Pleasure

Act – Laughter Tears & Rage

Hoodlum Priest – Heart Of Darkness

Seal – Seal

Andrew Poppy – The Beating Of Wings

Grace Jones – Slave To The Rhythm

FORGET!

ZTT’s most embarrassing moments

Leilani – Cartoon bubblegum pop, but lacking any irony or wit.

Public Demand – Not even Horn remixes or Morleyist sleeve dabblings could save ZTT’s R&B-styled boy-band.

Glam Metal Detectives - Doesn’t the name say it all?

Honky – One great single, one terrible album.

The ‘rock’ period – If you’re building a complete ZTT collection, leave the works of Shane MacGowan, The Marbles, The Frames and Lee Griffiths until last…

TOP 10 RARITIES

The ‘holy grails’ of ZTT completists

Act – Chance (12”, BETT 1, £120) Pressed up but cancelled before hitting the shops on account of an unauthorised Abba sample.

Nasty Rox Inc. – Ca$h (CD, ZTT 1CD, £100) Rumoured not to exist, barely more than 1000 copies of this album were pressed on CD.

All Saints – Silver Shadow (ZANG 53, £80) Shaznay Lewis and Melanie Blatt’s debut single was available across at least five formats, but was completely ignored at the time of release, although it’s not highly sought-after.

Shades of Rhythm – The Happy Feelings EP (ZANG 32, £50) 20,000 7”, 12” and CD singles of what would undoubtedly have been Shades’ biggest hit single were incinerated due to an uncleared Ultra Magnetic MCs sample. Unmelted promo double packs are common by comparison.

Hoodlum Priest – Licensed To Thrill (promo cassette, KT 1, £50) Extreme sports film director Greg Stump is a big ZTT fan and this tape is the only official release of Hoodlum Priest’s Crime Inc., the track that got them signed to ZTT.

808 State – Remix Sampler (promo cassette, no cat no., £50) The only appearance so far of 808’s most legendary remix – their own take on Art Of Noise’s Moments In Love.

Sun Electric – Red Summer (12” promo, SAM 889, £40) One of the three ‘Berlin beats’ 12” promos, Trevor Horn later used this track as the backing for his cover of Scott Walker’s Jacky with Marc Almond.

Art of Noise – Beat Box Diversion 3 & 4 (NME promo cassette, £30) These two special mixes by Paul Morley for NME readers continued his bizarre naming conventions – but as he once said himself “ZTT’s business is the puzzle, not the explanation…”.

IN THE VAULTS

So rare they didn’t even press promos…

Esquire — One of the very first signings to ZTT, Esquire was a prog-rock band fronted by Trevor Horn’s friend Nikki Squire, then wife of Yes bassist Chris. Frankie and Propaganda were on ZTT’s Action Series and Esquire were set to head up the Fatal Series. Various tracks were rehearsed and demoed, but with Horn working flat out on Frankie the band spent three years waiting on the side-lines. In 1986 the lawyers moved in and Esquire signed to Geffen, Horn receiving a small credit on the minor hit To The Rescue.

Girl Bros — Seal played a part in getting Wendy & Lisa signed to ZTT in 1994. At first they worked on the Toys soundtrack and then spent almost a year in the studio with Trevor Horn working on the album Friendly Fire. At one point there was talk of it appearing under the name The Wendy & Lisa Band, then Girl Bros, the duo’s new moniker conjured up to throw off their on-going Prince associations. But Horn and Wendy & Lisa just didn’t click, and the duo split from the label, with the album falling into contractual hell.

The Belle Stars — When ZTT acquired Stiff Records in 1987, one of the few acts they took on that they actually worked with was The Belle Stars. Their final single, World Domination, looked and sounded like a ZTT release but still bore the Stiff logo. “‘World Domination’ went to No.2 in the American dance chart,” remembers bassist Lesley Shone. “The Americans were begging for the album, but Trevor wouldn’t release it.”

The Killer Dogs — When Trevor Horn heard NWOBHM-mainstay Billy Liesegang’s guitar session on Transvision Vamp’s Baby I Don’t Care, he immediately wanted to sign his band. “Trevor had signed me up to his company and wanted to produce my band for ZTT,” he later recalled. “He wanted to replace our singer Tony Lawrence with John Wetton, as he didn’t like that heavy metal type of voice. We worked with John, but there was a major reshuffling of management at ZTT and we never got a chance to do that album, just a load of sessions…”

Furniture — Within weeks following up the classic 1986 single ‘Brilliant Mind’, Furniture’s label, Stiff went into liquidation. ZTT picked up the pieces and the band re-recorded Brilliant Mind for the John Hughes film Some Kind Of Wonderful, and toured Eastern Europe, Egypt and Greece as representatives of The British Council, causing riots in Cairo. They left the label in the late 80s without releasing a single note.

THE ESSENTIAL FRANKIE COLLECTABLES

20 years on, FGTH collecting is a mini industry. I’ll give toy £8 for a Peruvian 7” of Relax. Seriously!

Lo Cole - Welcome To The Pleasuredome (£5,000) – The painter who created the original, Picasso-esque images for Frankie’s debut album has recently been selling unused portraits from his archives.

Born To Run (4:50 Mix, £250) This 7” acetate from The Sound Clinic has the original version of Frankie’s Springsteen cover, which was altered at the last minute before being released on Pleasuredome.

Warrior (3:18 Attack Mix) (no cat no. £200) Gary Moore played guitar on the Attack mix for a special 12”. This seven inch version was press on acetate by PRT Studios but never got released.

Welcome To The Pleasuredome (PZTAS 7, £195) The uncut version of this apple-shaped picture disc – of which only a handful are thought to exist – recently appeared on eBay.

Rage Hard – The Total (ZTAS 22, £150) Extension overdrive in this promo box set containing all six formats of the Rage Hard single.

Pleasure-Pak (ISLP 1021, £100) Containing special cassingles of Relax and Two Tribes with the debut album, this box set only appeared in Canada.

Liverpool (ZCIQ8, £90) Selected cassette versions of Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s second album had a pink inlay and the unique Stuttered! Version of the Watching The Wildlife single. Here’s the dilemma – it’s a budget-looking inlay and the mix is only marginally different from the standard, but it is exceedingly rare nonetheless. To buy or not to buy…

Watching The Wildlife (CTIS 26, £50) ZTT pioneered feature-length cassette singles. This one had a set of unique remixes and free promo condoms.

Relax Remixes (SAM 1231, £50) From FGTH’s tenth anniversary came this double 12” promo of remixes in gatefold picture sleeve. A similar release for Two Tribes (SAM 1301) will fetch the same price, as does a 12” of promo-only remixes by German outfit Intermission (SAM 1331).

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

Now based permanently in the US, Frankie Goes To Hollywood bassist Mark O’Toole is finally making music again in a band called Trapped By Mormons. “I joined them about two years ago,” he told me. “Playing live is tremendous because the music is pretty aggressive and loud as hell, which is the way I like it. I produced a five-song CD last year for the band, which got quite a bit of local airplay, and we are currently recording a full length album. If you visit trappedbymormons.com there are some MP3s and live video footage.”

“Without ZTT there’d be no Anne Pigalle,” Horn and Morley apparently told her in the last meeting they had. “I just got up and left, that was the final straw,” she remembers, and headed to LA to begin working on film projects. She recently returned to England and released the Gille Peterson-endorsed independant release No Title Amerotic (www.annepigalle.com). Select live dates and exhibitions in recent months have seen the return of her enigmatic stage persona, once described “as if Edith Piaf walked into the Star Wars bar.”

MC Tunes is still working hard and currently developing a new artist called SpreadLove, a young rapper whose debut single is out this month on Asia Records. He has eight tracks in the can for his next album, has just finished a track called Adrenalin for Alabama 3’s new album and has just launched his won website, www.nickylockett.com.

Paul Morley published the definitive overview of ‘intelligent pop’, Words & Music (Bloomsbury) in 2003, and is a regular TV pundit from Newsnight to Top Ten Drum Breaks. ZTT fans will delight in tracking down releases on Sense (of Island) the label Paul Morley ran after leaving ZTT. Their records were packaged even more intricately, and the music was even more diverse. He is currently putting together a new band called Image Of A Group and label, Service Audio Visual.

There’s a whole stream of mid-80s bands ranging from ABC to Front 242 to The Pet Shop Boys that can be seen as being ‘very ZTT’.

I was giving a metaphorical look to an idea of what I thought intelligent pop was. But anything from that period in a way – it wasn’t that they ‘were ZTT’, it was more that I was trying to be them. I would look around at the likes of The Pet Shop Boys or whatever, and it was very difficult to say where one began and the other ended. We all had similar ideas about smart pop and intelligent pop and the idea of getting into the mainstream with interesting ideas. The Human League would be running parallel, and it was coming out of Factory Records, and there was a label early on called Fetish that was quite influential on me. It was coming out of punk, coming out with the idea that you could get into the charts with interesting thoughts and ideas and images, that you could raid all sorts of things outside pop music to get your influences.

Should Frankie have stopped after one album? Wasn’t Pleasuredome always destined to be unrepeatable?

I think in the fictional world of ZTT it should have only lasted about one album and its complete run was four singles. There was then the possibility of selling them to Sony at the time and in a theoretical way I was possibly the one person in the camp that was pro that. It was probably naïve of me, or maybe sophisticated, I don’t know which way round it is. But as a journalist, as a commentator, I knew that its energy was over. But from a record label point of view that’s the last thing they want to hear, because they’ve invested so much, the second album’s crucial, they’ve got to break America. To me at the time, those things were irrelevancies. I wanted them to cover The Velvet Underground’s Heroin at one point and they wanted to do Suffragette City. For me, I knew it was all over then…

How did your work and involvement in the label come to an end?

In the end it became more about what Trevor was producing, rather than being able to get this variety act going, this kind of surreal variety act of acts that weren’t necessarily done by Trevor but the spirit of Trevor existed in them. Propaganda was an example of where it did work, because he didn’t actually produce A Secret Wish, he only did Mabuse. So that kind of worked, but in a way that never got followed up which was a shame because there was a moment when they were almost on the verge of being like a kind of techno U2. There was a moment when you could see them as a stadium act. And if they had second album, that would have happened.

I really wanted it to be like a Mute or a Factory or a Domino. I really felt that it could be and should be. But I was coming from a different background really. I was a journalist but I was interested in new music, new acts. I wanted to sign new acts, I wanted to work with them, I wanted to make them happen in an exciting and unusual kind of way. I wanted to give them a kind of freedom. But all that kind of backfired for various reasons – legal, business, political, sociological! It almost became the opposite of what I’d really wanted it to be, in terms of being an experience for people.

But stylistically, for a few months, it was absolutely what I always thought it would be. The whole idea that there was this kind of a weird narrative that was being told, every sleeve was like a page out of a book, every advert was like a page out of a book. It told a story, it has life, it had variety. Everything was entertaining. Even a quarter page ad, I made sure it was entertaining. A poster was entertaining, a sleeve, a label, even the writing on the label. I wanted everything to be entertaining. But them I quickly realised that I’d got carried away, if you like. Because to other people – that really owned to company – I’d just been given a job, and it wasn’t really mine.

You’ve talked very little publicly about your work with ZTT since leaving

It’s difficult to explain. It’s something that I feel I was very part of but it’s been very difficult for me to really claim it, because there was a moment when, If I did claim it, it was deemed that I was trying to claim something that was beyond my level. Or I was taking responsibility for something that wasn’t really me. There is a view where that’s right – it was Trevor’s music that was the fundamental heart of it. But because I personally felt that I had given so much to it, it was difficult for me to accept that it wasn’t something that I could take with me.

What made you come back in the late 90s?

I came back because of The Art Of Noise. Trevor wanted to do them again and I liked the idea very much. And I liked that idea of working with Anne again very much. It was an interesting project, that I thought could have been fantastic. I guess it was that dreadful thing, which is awful for a non-nostalgic person to say, but you can’t let go. If you’ve done something creative, you want it to have the life it could have had. And I felt that my version of ZTT hadn’t carried on, for whatever reason…